Not so long ago I was at a supper party about which I can give no other details than that the Cuban Ambassador and a well-known political industrialist were present. At some late, lubricated point between cheese and liqueurs, the captain of industry commended the man from Havana for his country’s imperviousness to such destabilising currents as democracy and individualism. Better stability, said the peer, winking, than chaos! I have heard the same thing, from similar sources, about China. It never, it seems to me, stops being said about the Middle East and Africa.

Should we, then, this week be celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall at all? When people under 35, who can barely imagine the Iron Curtain and the days when the Polish plumber was a defector, not an economic migrant, ask why 1989 was so good, do we actually have an answer?

In a recent book, Democracy Kills: What’s So Good About Having the Vote?, the BBC foreign correspondent Humphrey Hawksley asks an excellent sceptic’s question but gives a worryingly credulous reply.

Though his argument is tempered by exceptions and caveats, the sense of his conclusion is quite clear. In many places, “the holding of elections has produced high levels of corruption and violence”, or “the average income in authoritarian China is now twice that of democratic India” or, his ace in the hole, “Haitians who are allowed to elect their governments live 20 years less than those in dictatorial Cuba where average life expectancy is 77 years.”

Not that the place is so very bad — the BBC man relates a visit to Cuba in 2002 in which he meets the smooth Ricardo Alarcón, president of the National Assembly, a body (Hawksley fails to note) that rarely meets. Together they “spent some time working out the numbers”. Cuba had about 400 political prisoners, but the US had 750 terror suspects in Guantánamo. The significance of this seems merely to suggest that Cuba, with its total lack of press and demonstrative political freedom is, if anything, a rather less badly behaving place than the US.

But Hawksley’s main comparison is Haiti. If the rest of the Caribbean was rendered uninhabitable, leaving only Cuba and Haiti, where would you rather go? Cuba, because, “if you live under an authoritarian system and you speak out against it, you will be punished. But your children will be educated. They will receive basic health care and live relatively secure lives. Everybody would like there to be a better balance, but the awkward choice is there, plain for all to see.”

Hawksley’s comparison is perverse. Haiti was a dictatorship until 1987, and always one of the poorest countries in the Americas. By contrast, in 1958, before Castro seized power, Cuba was far wealthier and far more advanced than its island neighbour. It would seem more natural to compare Cuba with Jamaica, or even Costa Rica, a liberal democracy with 97 per cent literacy.

If you do, Hawksley’s “awkward choice” disappears. In a week when the Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez was roughed up by secret service goons, it seems perfectly possible to imagine a Cuba where Sanchez and everyone else enjoys democratic rights and liberties without morphing into Haiti. But Hawksley’s pessimism seems less isolated in the post-Iraq world.

Indeed, it seems positively à la mode. Early next year we are promised a three-part BBC TV series on diplomacy, fronted by that red-fetlocked epitome of elegant plausibility, Sir Christopher Meyer. The book is already out and has been demanding attention for the deep thoughts of the former Ambassador to Washington. I think it is fair to say, that Getting Our Way is mostly a polemic against an ideological or value-driven foreign policy, and in favour of realpolitik.

He criticises Robin Cook’s “much-vaunted” ethical foreign policy (far more sneered against than vaunted, I’d say) and praises Palmerston’s dictum about there being no eternal alliances and enemies, but only eternal national interests, although what these are, Sir Christopher doesn’t say.

But “nowadays, to our damage as a nation, we have allowed the necessary rigour of foreign policy to become diluted by fashionable but fraudulent notions of the postmodern state, which elevates the daft utopianism of ‘global values’ at the expense of the national interest”.

We would understand what this means even if no examples were provided. But they are. Castlereagh’s Congress of Vienna (which bolstered imperial reactionaries in Europe for 100 years) came from a policy that took the world as it found it “not as it might wish it to be”, and meant no “general war” in Europe for 99 years. But who needed general wars, Sir Christopher, when you had the Crimean, Franco-Prussian, Austro-Prussian, Franco-Austrian, Balkan and sundry other particular wars, before ending in the big one?

According to Sir Christopher, what turned the 1919 Treaty of Versailles into a Second World War-creating catastrophe, was the idealism of the League of Nations, not the absurdly short-term, self-interested nature of the Allied war reparations and the territorial demands made on the defeated powers.

Nor were we (or should we have been) animated during the Cold War by any real concern for those doomed to live out 45 years on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. Having been correct to slice up the continent at Yalta, “it suited Britain to press aggressively the cause of dissidents in the old Soviet Union because we were engaged in a global war of ideas against Russian communism”.

The circular logic of this last cynical sentiment appears to escape Meyer, but his meaning is clear. We won’t, and we shouldn’t, agitate for civil liberties in China. We won’t and we shouldn’t allow Ukraine into Nato. We won’t and we shouldn’t seek to push democracy on the governments of the Middle East, no matter what their peoples might want, for we should prize stability above democracy abroad. We should agree with Douglas Hurd at the time of Bosnia but before Srebrenica, fulminating against the “something-must-be-done” brigade.

Probably best, too, if we shape the imagined world to the necessities of this “realism” by deploying the relativist declension: it isn’t so bad, we aren’t so much better, it may be what they want, their politics are intractable, fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

And behind the new curtains of iron or velvet, the oppressed come to curse us for our complacency, damn us for our hypocrisy and lose hope in the possibilities of liberty.

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